Maker's breath : Schmooples!

Darkspawn's blood: I get to chose who gets to be the ruler twice?!

Dragon Age: Origins accomplishes something outstanding. It manages to carve out a thoroughly immersive and deep experience from the most generic-ass materials imaginable. Is hard to think of any element in this game that is in some sense revolutionary or even just plain original. The setting is the same-old medieval fantasy land populated with races filling the usual nitches. Elves are nimble hunters and magic adepts, dwarves are subterranean tough-guys responsible for crafting the best equipments, and humans are the "default" folk that form the bulk of the population. The plot offers nothing new: a horde of monsters born from the evil of humankind threatens the world from below ground and small strange fellowship of multiracial heroes is the only hope.

What raises Dragon Age: Origins above the sea of generic fantasy RPGs is it's nearly perfect execution and sublime characterisation. Even if your companions can be overly archetypical at times, they all have their own voice that make them unique and spending hours on end talking with them on camp or on the road is the highlight of the game. The fact that they converse with each other also elevates them from simple non-player characters to fully formed people with lives independent of the main protagonist. (Of course, as in every piece of fiction, this is all artifice since those conversations are there only for the player to hear).

And even if the plot can be generic in its general aspects, there's a lot of personality in the minutia. And while player's decisions often don't deeply impact the gameplay , they are often meaningful and lend themselves to rich roll playing. The same can be said about dialogue options. The in-game difference between each response can be next to nil, but they do help build the personality of the player character and even create room for growth.

In my case, my character started as a naive and idealistic mage that sought powerful magic as a way of elevating herself over her elven roots. But after being betrayed one too many times, started to grow a bit sour and more cynical. Thus, she decided to kill her former friend from the Circle of Magi who lied to her and tarnished her reputation, and didn't felt so bad when aiding a shitty dwarven politician's rise to power. Moreover, at the beginning she was pretty much an atheist --having no reason to believe in the Maker-- and felt close to Morrigan in mocking Leliana's kooky visions. But then she started to doubt after witnessing the Urn and its power.

Those small private threads were running through my head and had no impact on gameplay, but that's not always wrong. This independence unshackle the narrative from min-maxing gameplay and allows for greater freedom. A strong morality system like in Mass Effect 2 would force the player to basically choose a side and stick with it with removing player choice altogether.

As good as it is, it's not perfect. Combat is competent but the camera is clunky and the tactics screen in which you essentially get to program your companions AI is tedious and superfluous; I found it easier to just pause and micromanage them. Graphics are OK and still hold up (although many people would disagree), but here there's no uniqueness. Many pieces of equipment are recycled models with different colours or textures and even the ones that are purposely different are almost identical. Mages get short shrift in this department, with few options of customisation and most of them utterly uninteresting to look at. Inventory management not only is similarly lame. Characters have two weapon slots but you can only compare items to one of them. Thankfully, since most of the time loot is useless crap anyway, there's not a lot of pressure in tossing stuff to the ground.

Dragon Age: Origins is one of those exceptional games that left me with a bittersweet feeling in the end. I loved almost every minute of it, but I'm sad that it's done. I will miss the nightly chats with Alistar, Leliana, Wynne and the rest, Morrigan's and Alistar's bickering and Oghren disgusting drunken smell. No doubt that we'll meet soon enough in a few years when I replay this gem.

I know Bioware has lost some of its goodwill with gamers lately. But there was a time when "Bioware magic" was a real thing. This game is an example of that. It is a quintessential CRPG experience. Although many people have written about this game, allow me to lay out a few of my own experiences.

--The Good--

This game is ten years old now, as of the writing of this review. The graphics are starting to lose their luster and the interface is starting to feel clunky, but if you can get past those few cobwebs this is a timeless game. The best part is the writing, that is the characters and the story. The characters all feel like real people, written and presented in the game with care and humor. The story is more intricate than it had to be, with choices that really had some weight to them. Mechanically it all boiled down to "pick A, B, or C." But the way those choices were written and presented really made them feel like they were more than that, and it was always satisfying to see the ways those decisions impacted the story later.

Playing this game felt to me as if I was playing a fantasy novel in the best ways.

Gameplay itself is good enough. There is lots of customization when it comes to your characters, allowing you to make a main character and a party that fits your style of play. By the mid-game I felt like a badass, my Arcane Warrior throwing exploding fire balls and groups of enemies and then pulling out a long sword to finish any stragglers. Just don't expect anything too out-of-the-box, even by the standards of 2009. This game is a straightforward fantasy RPG and I think the strength of the title is in how it embraces that genre fully, taking it seriously, and making sure it all works consistently. There is active pausing, which really helps. The camera can move, so you can get up high and tactical or up close and personal, but the camera was sometimes a little finicky, getting caught and bumping into stuff especially in tight indoor locations.

--The Bad--

Because this game has such a complex story with so many branching paths it can be overwhelming. I don't necessarily think this is a bad thing, but it might put someone off who is looking for a more straightforward experience. This is one of those games where if you don't choose one certain dialogue option in one optional side quest it can make it so that you don't get the ending you want twenty hours later. This happened to me. It had to do with the character Alistair and the complicated way he fits in to the end of the story, but I won't spoil it for you.

By the end of the game I did find that I was beginning to suffer a bit from choice fatigue. Whenever I'd get into a conversation with one of my companions I would start to get stressed. Which dialogue choice would get me the most approval? What if I made the wrong choice and cut myself off from an interesting side conversation or even a whole quest? There were times where if I sided with the wrong person in a conversation a companion would turn hostile towards me and need to be put down. I eventually got through it though by remembering that this is just a game (obviously), that making imperfect choices was part of the experience, and that all these choices made the play-through uniquely mine. As a casual gamer mostly looking for straightforward experiences and gamer thrills, it was a good lesson to re-learn.

One last thing to keep in mind is that this is an older game so you might hit some problems getting it to run properly. My game would sometimes crash over and over when I first started playing, getting worse the longer I played. I did a lot of searching and found out that the game is not optimized to run on x64 systems, so the game requires a small patch (called the 4GB patch which you can find here - http://www.ntcore.com/4gb_patch.php). After that the game only crashed twice in 80 hours.

--The Verdict--

My verdict on this one is simple. If you have any interest in RPGs then you need to play this game. The ultimate edition is still on Steam (not on Origin) and goes on sale pretty frequently.

I did it, after many failed attempts, I have finally beaten Dragon Age Origins!

This year I played Baldur's Gate and then Knights of the Old Republic (also each for the first time), so it made sense to continue down the progression with DAO.

My thoughts on the game.

The Characters: -For a game with several potential party members, I don't think there were any uninteresting duds. Every team mate had their moments and some backstory that I enjoyed. I also liked all of their personalities. (gameplay wise I didn't like all of them but more on that later). Usually there are a few just boring team mates in games like this (looking at you Kaiden and Ashley in Mass effect), but here I didn't feel there was an obvious weak link.

The hard choices in the game are 100% the ones the revolve around your party. In a way, this works, because it's your party I grew to care about, not the wider NPCs.

-The NPCs in the world, almost without exception, don't have nearly the same love and personality put into them as your party. Loghain sort of works as a villain (since the Archdemon basically has no personality), but even he feels one dimensional. This impacted my investment and enjoyment of the story a lot. I just didn't care as much about what happened to the wider world because I didn't care as much about the characters. I think some of this is because of the pacing issues the game has (more on that later)

The Story: -I think the story holds up surprisingly well. It's nothing groundbreaking, but for a first game, building up the world and lore, there is a lot to like here. I also like that the way it is designed leaves the order up to player choice.

A special note to the creativity of the setting. It takes a lot of generic fantasy tropes, and tweaks or plays with them just enough that I loved discovering the lore. I really like getting to actually explore the ancient dwarven ruins. Very Mines of Moria, and I was about it!

Some of the choices are legitimately hard to make, and I think unlike Mass Effect, some of the consequences aren't clear. I liked that I wasn't pigeon holed into Paragon/Renegade, and could bounce between stuff without being penalized. It let me roleplay better.

I also really loved that the game create your party having reactions to choices. It helped build them up even more as participating in the choices, rather then being passive participants.

Gameplay: -This is acceptable. I am sure some modern gamers will hate it. For me I think it was acceptable. Character development was interesting, but had some flaws in that it isn't explained too well, and I feel like you don't get a chance to do much with your second specialization, unless you know how to unlock them quickly. But overall, I didn't hate the gameplay once I played more.

-The range of spells was interesting. I really loved frost magic, which seemed over powered. If I played again, I would definitely try leaning into another school of magic.

-My biggest complain is the game seems to want to have an aggro system, but it never quite worked. Allistair regularly just failed at tanking and my mages ended up dead, until I just accepted I would have to pop between characters micromanaging them all. Because of this, a lot of the shield abilities just didn't feel worth it. Frustratingly, I don't think the tactic system works well. Its a cool idea, and groundbreaking for it's time, but it is convoluted, and can be a huge time sink for little reward, particularly if you are just constantly bouncing between characters like I was.

Pacing/Mechanics:

This is I think the worst part of the game. Almost every segment, every quest, every moment, could be shorter, to deliver between emotional pacing and investment. Do I really need to grind through like 12 spider encounters in the Deep Roads? Particularly when they all feel the same? Many moments of the game would have felt cooler if the combats were more dynamic, less frequent, and gave more frequent story beat hits.

Exploring the winding dungeons often had no point, because the locked chests loot was just so bad after a while.

In addition, bag space fills up SO frustratingly fast that I was constantly dumping stuff to make room. If you are going to almost only give crap loot, at least let me carry it all to sell!

Finally, while I can appreciate the companion relationship building system here, it didn't always make sense. Early on it felt like some characters hated everything I had to say (Sten...) and I ended up giving up on them. You can even accidentally miss recruiting characters with dialogue choices, when it isn't clear. I also never really knew when my party would have new dialogue.

Overall, I am glad I finally beat DAO, this has been on my bucket list for a long time. I don't think it holds up as well as some of Bioware's other games. I have little desire to replay it anytime soon. But, I enjoyed my time with it. I will be trying DA2 and Inquisition in the next year or so, but for now I will be taking a bioware break!

For more than a decade a was unable to follow the happenings in the video game industry for lacking access to modern consoles or a good computer. That is when I devoted myself to a whole bunch of obscure retro games and tabletop. But since 2021 I have had consistent access to a decent computer (anything up until 2015 runs fine) so I am slowly catching up on all those games I missed. This one belonging to that bunch.

It was really good. Someone told me once that this had a lovely D&D feeling that I would appreciate and... yeah, kinda. The story was reeeeally engaging and the characters were fun.

Something curious that I felt while playing this is that I fully devoted like 75 hours to the main campaign, and once it was done and saw the other remaining campaigns... Man I just felt like "nah, maybe later" so I didn't even attempt to complete the rest of achievements. I don't know if this is an indicator of my completionist self boarding the ship to Valinor or if really is a game that requires some pacing. Probably I will go back to complete it, but next year or something like that.

OVERVIEW

• Rating: 10/10
• Hours played: 200+
• Pros: Story and worldbuilding, role-playing, replayability, build options
• Cons: challenge balancing, bad pacing on some sections, class balancing, loadings

PLAYTHROUGHS

I have completed Dragon Age: Origins (DA:O) 4 times: Human Mage, Dalish Elven Archer, Human Noble Warrior (2-handed) and Dwarven Noble Rogue (dual-wielder) - the first three were male and the last one female. The first playthrough was on normal and took me about 60 hours. I have tried the easy mode on the second run, for a story-focused experience, and the hard mode for the fourth one. I also played the Awakening expansion twice and the Stone Prisoner DLC once.

GAMEPLAY

DA:O feels like a modern take on the old-school RPG's from the late 90's in a lot of ways. If you're familiar with the Neverwinter Nights series, specially with the Obsidian-developed NWN2, a lot of elements will be easily recognizable - from some of the controls to the overall gameplay structure and combat system. One of the biggest elements this game pulls from the older titles is the amount of options they give to players on many different areas, as I'll be discussing next.

A good place to start is with the class system. The Dragon Age series offer 3 classes to players: the warrior, the rogue and the mage. Each of them have their own set of unique abilities and roles to fulfill on your 4-man party: mages have many schools of magic, each with plenty of spells to allow for a variaty of playstyles - damage, crowd control, buffers and healers are all available-, warriors can focus on a shield and defensive abilities to become tanks or take a more aggressive path with big weapons, and lastly, rogues can become great archers or stealthy assassins. Also, each class comes with 4 specialization options (each character can have 2 by the end of the game). They can enhance your role (a rogue that picks Assassin can become even more deadly) or open up your options (a rogue that picks the Bard specialization can be of great support to the party).

All of this is pretty standard when it comes to RPG's, but the multiple options really do help with the replay value of this game. The downside of the system is the balancing, since some abilities and specializations range from underwhelming to useless, and the balance between the classes themselves is very off, with the mage being an obvious standout. I don't think this detract too much, though, since, from my experience, as it's perfectly possible to feel very badass with a two-handed sword or dual-daggers late in the game. The archer was the only playstyle I actively disliked, which is funny since that's usually one of my favourites on RPG's and action games in general.

Another classic RPG trope used here is the skill system. Figuring out a good and balanced party has to take them into account to make your life easier in Ferelden. Coercion is awesome for the main character, since it opens various dialog options, and rogues who specialize on traps and lockpicking are very helpful when going through dungeons. Other skills will be helpful to grant you more (and better) potions or even to solve some quests.

Party AI can be customized on many levels, which really helps making the combat more dynamic by reducing the amount of micro-management needed to go through most fights. The real-time with pause combat system is going to be very familiar to anyone who played the old-scholl CRPG's - it's not everyone's cup of tea, but I enjoy it and believe it's one of the best executions of the system. The game can be tough at times, so having a balanced party with good AI behaviour is a must to avoid frustration. Picking a healer do feel like a necessity at times, which brings the class balancing issue to light once more.

Other issues with the gameplay include the poor pacing of some missions and dungeons, that often become a chore of fight after fight with not enough story or exploration to keep things interesting (I'm looking at you, Deep Roads). Also, difficulty can become a problem, since the game works on a system where enemies level up with the main character, but only within certain ranges. Because the game opens up relatively early, allowing for players to explore areas in whatever order they choose (similar to what Bioware did with the planets of KOTOR) it's possible to go to a place and find it either too easy or too hard because your party is not on the ideal level range.

With all of that said, the main gameplay aspect of DA:O is the role-playing, and that's where the amount of options given to you on race, backgroung, class and the personality you want to give to the Hero of Ferelden shines. There's plenty of customization to do, and the dialog allows for players to guide their characters and their relationships with the world of the game pretty much however they want. The game offers plenty of flavour changes to the story based on how you play, which is the greatest source of replayability here. Your main-quest decisions will also play a role on how the world will be at the end, providing a good sence of consequence to the protagonist's actions.

NARRATIVE

DA:O is a narrative-driven RPG, so a good story is to be expected, and Bioware delivers. The player's interactions with different characters and factions can change the landscape pretty significantly, and the multiple role-playing options allow for substancially different experiences on multiple playthroughs.

The main plot doesn't land too far from a Tolkien-esque "the dark armies are coming and we need allies" structure. It's a big cliché for this type of fantasy, but it's well executed by the writers. What helps a lot to make the story worth your time are the great cast of characters that are presented with amazing voice-acting - it's instantly easier to care about the game when the NPCs are that interesting, and DA:O has one of my favourite casts of party-members on any RPG!

Moving away from the Forgotten Realms setting gave Bioware enough freedom to build their own world, and, again, they nailed it: everything, from politics, religion, economy, history and geography is done with great care and I love learning more and more about Thedas. Plenty of topics are dubious, however, leaving certain aspects of the world (like the nature of the fade, the details about Andraste's story and the origins of the darkspawn) open for discussion and interpretation, which I love.

DA:O starts with one of 6 origins stories (depending on the background of your choosing). They serve as a basic justification for why your character would join the Grey Wardens (an order of warriors dedicated to fight the evil Darkspawn). It's a good oportunity to direct the type of character you want to play, and they also provide variety for subsequent playthroughs. After a linear section at Ostagar, the game opens the map for the player to explore the different regions of Ferelden. I love the freedom of this "second act", and I also love the more linear act 3, where everything comes to a solution with exciting battles, as it's expected for a setting like this.

TECH

The graphics of DA:O are nothing to praise, but I love the art-style of the game, as it suits the setting and helps with the immersion process. Sound design and music are also pretty good. I have no recollection of major bugs or glitches from any of my playthroughs, but I only got to play the game a few years after the release. The UI and menus are better designed than most games of that era, so I also have no major complaint about it. The loadings, however, should have been better: even on a current-gen PC I have trouble with loading screens, and I can only imagine how bad it must have been for the console players when the game was released.

CONCLUSION

DA:O excels at what is most important for a game of its type: providing players with an interesting world to explore and a variety of options to make role-playing engaging and fun. The gameplay style is dated by today's standards, but if you like that concept, like me, there will be countless hours of joy and even good challenges to face. For the ones that don't, playing on easy can turn the combat into a breeze so you can enjoy the amazing narrative and worldbuilding of this masterpiece. One of my favourite games and a major recommendation to any RPG fan.

The graphics are very dated and outright ugly in places, but it's not enjoyment-affecting at all IMO. I've played games that aged far worse, and everything does its job. If you're on PC, there are plenty of texture and cosmetic mods to modernise things a little.

The characters don't stick with me as much as the DA2 and some of the Inquisition companions do, but they're varied and interesting nonetheless. Your romance options are Zevran, a seductive elven assassin; Leliana, a pious Chantry sister hiding dark secrets; Morrigan, a gothic and asocial swamp witch; and Alistair, a naive and humorous ex-Templar with royal blood. Additionally, you can recruit companions such as Wynne, an elderly healer who seems to be assisted by some mysterious force; Sten, a soldier from a foreign culture who's entirely new to Ferelden; Oghren, a dwarven berserker who's crude with a love of alcohol; and Loghain, a morally questionable but complex antagonist-turned-ally. The Stone Prisoner DLC will also give you Shale, a stone golem with a previously mortal identity.

The voice acting is varied but generally good - Alistair's VA is endearingly awkward, Leliana's sounds stilted in places, and Zevran stands out as suitably suave and perpetually amused. The dialogue options you get as the protagonist are typically pretty extensive and easy to roleplay within; my biggest complaint is that I feel romance/flirt dialogues are not at all obvious enough, and very easily confused with platonically kind gestures, which means you more often than not end up 'stealth' romancing a character.

The story is pretty generic, and overrated in my opinion - it's a cliche fantasy plot, there's an evil force threatening the world, you and your band of companions are the only ones who can stop it, and you have to travel around to individual locations in order to recruit factions for your army.

The gameplay is clunky, and my least favourite part of the game. The combat is aggravating enough that by the time I've been playing for a few hours I'm usually using mods just to skip most of the non-significant battles.

Overall, this game didn't connect with me as much as it seems to for most; I think nostalgia (and the "older = better" mindset among gaming elitists) is a huge factor in the favouritism for Origins, and I prefer the sequels in most respects. However, the extensive dialogue options and roleplaying opportunities keep me coming back to Origins regardless.